Translation of consumer electronics ?

More camera equipment just arrived, I’m happy to say : an EF 17-40 f4L lens (the one I was wishing I had in Scotland) and a 420EX flash along with some batteries and other stuff.

Reading through the accompanying documentation got me thinking – how does a company like Canon manage it’s translation, given that they don’t just produce documentation and software and do produce goods for a global market ?

The manual for the lens was a multilingual one, with Japanese, English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese translations. The flash arrived with two manuals, one in English and the other in French. Everything on the lens was written in English though, and indeed everything on the camera the lens is now attached to is also in English – do users in other countries expect to see localised controls ? Do Canon manufacture camera equipment that has also been translated into other languages – anyone know if I could get a French 20D ?

I guess you have to really know your market when doing translation of consumer devices – it could be difficult to change an item with Japanese logos and branding into one with, say Spanish logos and branding, unless of course you do everything in software or have a “skinnable” interface (like some Nokia phones I’ve seen) – but I guess that would sacrifice design, at some level.

At Sun, I’m not aware of much localisation we do on the hardware side – we do produce keyboards
in a variety of languages & layouts – but after that, I’m not sure what other changes we make to our hardware to suit different native languages (of course, our documentation is available on docs.sun.com in many languages)

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2 thoughts on “Translation of consumer electronics ?”

I’m sorry to say that, no, hardware such as cameras, UPS, motherboards and similar “technological” products do not usually come with localised controls. It isn’t the first time I find someone looking for the “Bloq Despl” key on a keyboard and it turns out that the key is labeled “Scroll Lock”, even when the other locks are labeled “Bloq Mayús” (=”Caps Lock”) and “Bloq Num” (=”Num Lock”). Odd, isn’t it?
Another thing I find quite disturbing is that, many times, the words that are used in the manual to refer to a labeled button, for example, the “Jump” button on your photo of the camera, might very well be translated as “Saltar” even when the spanish model of the camera has the same word “Jump” printed on the product. I know why this happens because I worked at a translation agency that did these kind of translations, and it’s very difficult to make a decision on whether to translate a word or not when you don’t have access to the final product (or the final product does not even exist yet).

As a professional translator I can confirm what Lucas already mentioned. We usually get the plain documents from our clients, no pictures, no explanations and no further comments on how to proceed. What we do is translate all of the text, assuming that the end-user will receive a localized product at his end. But that’s of course not the case most of the time.